Meet Crisis Text Line, one of the winners of this year’s Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship Awards
Next week marks the beginning of the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, the premier international platform for advancing entrepreneurial solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. (Follow #SkollWF on Twitter for updates on the Forum.) In the meantime, we were fortunate to get in touch with Nancy Lublin, founder & CEO of Crisis Text […]
10 tips for practicing lean impact in a time of rapid change
While the media and tech landscapes are changing rapidly—requiring nimble and adaptive business practices and new models—the larger social sector funding landscape can be stuck in model for a previous age, planning out discrete interventions and then collecting metrics to examine how many people were touched by them. And media funders—despite often being at the […]
MIF releases new report on global media philanthropy
As the world faces extraordinary challenges and ever more interconnected economic, social and communications systems, we know that media plays a key role in addressing and shaping the most pressing issues of our time—making global media philanthropy increasingly important. From supporting local reporting and protecting freedom of expression to improving health through public service radio […]
Why U.S. foundations should care about global media funding trends
Parachuting in is out. That’s one key takeaway from a new report from Media Impact Funders that we’re excited to release this week: Global Media Philanthropy: What Funders Need to Know About Data, Trends and Pressing Issues Facing the Field. Produced with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this scan of global media philanthropy […]
Corporate and political power diminishes quality journalism in India
With nearly 400 television news channels, an expanding newspaper market driven by regional languages, and the second highest number of internet users in the world, journalism in India can appear vibrant and thriving. But amidst the din of breaking news alerts, voices of critique and quality independent journalism grow fainter in the face of aggressive […]
Philanthropy’s blind spot is investing in our sector’s media
“Even the best-designed communication strategy will fail if there is no public platform from which to amplify campaigns.” (Oak Foundation, 2017 annual review) Late last year, Alliance magazine devoted a whole issue to the growing involvement of philanthropy and the media. Almost all contributors agreed that more funding of media—from investigative journalism to new technologies […]
The old is new again: Public service media in the funding agenda
The most trusted news sources? The providers of children’s educational programming? The curators, funders, and distributors of national cultural products? The safeguards of minority voices? The answer: Public service broadcasters. The list may seem idealistic, but applies at least partly to many national and publicly funded media organizations.
For funders working inside of hostile nations, sometimes the only solution is to leave
When the board of the Open Society Foundations (OSF) decided in spring 2018 to close its operation in Hungary, many local activists and NGOs were outraged, asserting that the charity— endowed by philanthropist George Soros—should stay and fight the populist, immigrant-bashing government of prime minister Viktor Orban. OSF’s decision to leave was prompted by the […]
A holistic approach to operational and digital security
A shrinking civic space and advanced technological means of attacking, surveilling, and silencing critics should concern all those who support civil society and other development objectives, and especially those who work with independent, investigative and community news organizations. According to Reporters without Borders’ 2018 report, “The climate of hatred is steadily more visible… The line […]
Lessons from citizen journalism—the promise of citizen philanthropy
More than a decade ago, a set of smart technologists predicted that social change would spring directly from the crowd, rather than managed by formal organizations controlling what gets done and by whom. How right they were. Today, technology is giving people access to systems and institutions that allow them to connect, communicate, and engage […]
Funding media freedom and digital rights: Taking a demand-driven approach to facilitate coordination and collaboration
Over the past decade, the challenges facing media funders have expanded at an alarming pace. It has now become hackneyed to note the vast changes wrought by the rapid global proliferation of the internet and communication technologies: from the crisis of disinformation and misinformation to decreased readership of traditional news providers to the Orwellian-seeming surveillance […]
Coalition-building as an approach to media development
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last two decades of international development, it’s that politics matter, yet this lesson has not been fully assimilated into the media assistance sector. In governance, health, education, and nearly every other area, there is a growing recognition that durable solutions to the world’s problems need to get […]